notes in a shoebox

I was thinking about new material that I will use for teaching this coming semester (starting the third week of February) and suddenly compiled the following list of links:

William Briggs writes It is time to stop teaching Frequentism to non-statisticians in a paper submitted to The American Statistician. Clearly he doesn’t want to be controversial with an abstract that reads We should cease teaching frequentist statistics to undergraduates and switch to Bayes. Doing so will reduce the amount of confusion and over-certainty rife among users of statistics.

Reading newspapers or other sources of news is often a frustrating endeavor for the scientifically minded person. Tom Scott makes the experience more bearable with his handy design for journalism warning labels. This would be the perfect complement to Stats Chat’s “Stat of the week” competition.

R-bloggers, the aggregator of bloggers writing about R, has reached 300 bloggers. Quantum Forest is part of that ever-growing R orgy.

I am currently sending new-to-R colleagues to Quick-R as a starting point. It is particularly useful if they already know how to run stats in another software (and then I’m not a slave on R-support duty). Thanks Robert for putting it together! Incidentally, I’m ordering a couple of copies of his book R in Action for our department.